Brightspace – Turnitin

Contents

Turnitin is a tool that can be used to assess similarities between students’ written submissions and other documents. TurnItIn generates a report that compares the content of student submissions to websites, journal articles, and other written assignments collected at the University of Vermont, along with other schools.

Note

All images in this tutorial are screenshots.

Creating a Turnitin Similarity Assignment

Step 1: Go to Course Tools: Assignments

Create an assignment as you normally would, but tweak some options for TurnItIn.

See the UVM Knowledge Base article: Brightspace – Assignments.

Best Practice

Add a note to students’ instructions: “Turnitin is enabled for this assignment.”

Step 2: Under Submission & Completion, select “Compatible with Turnitin” under Allowable File Extensions

When you select Compatible with Turnitin, these are the Allowed File Extensions: doc, docx, html, hwp, odt, pdf, pps, ppsx, ppt, pptx, ps, rtf, txt, wpd, xls, and xlsx.

Step 3: Under Evaluation & Feedback, select Manage TurnItIn

Best Practice

Allow learners to see similarity scores in their submission folder

Choose “Enable Similarity Report”

Evaluating a Turnitin Similarity Assignment

Go to Course Tools > Assignments > Select a Turnitin Assignment > View Submissions

Interpreting a Turnitin Similarity Report

Select the report you wish to review

The report will open in a new window.

The similarity tools are on the left-hand side of the report.

Flag

Hidden Text: Text has been found that is the same color as the background color. This can be an attempt to artificially inflate the word count of a document or to throw off similarity detection.
Replaced Characters: The author of the paper has swapped out easily mistakable letters from different alphabets to try to elude similarity detection. The characters were replaced for the characters that align with the language of the paper when generating the Similarity Report, but the intention of academic misconduct is there.